The Hobbit Will Fundamentally Change Your Movie-Going Experience

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The Hobbit Will Fundamentally Change Your Movie-Going Experience

According to an article over at the Hollywood Reporter, the upcoming release of The Hobbit will be the catalyst that finally drives movie theaters to upgrade their projection hardware to 48 frames-per-second (fps) or better. The current theater playback technology supports 24fps, a standard that dates back to the 1920s; this, in-turn, was an upgrade from the 16fps that was common for earlier silent films. As video-game enthusiasts are keenly aware, a higher frame-rate reduces jitter and provides much smoother video playback, and that translates to a more immersive and realistic experience overall. And for the trivia buffs among you, the move from 16fps to 24fps was necessitated by the advent of movie audio — the original 16fps film speed moved too slowly to produce quality sound playback. (text revised per notes from our ever-vigilent readers - thanks!)

In recent years, theaters have been steadily converting from celluloid-film projectors to digital projection technology, although not without serious objection from such respected industry pundits as Roger Ebert. For those locations that have already gone digital, the upgrade to 48fps will simply involve a software upgrade and modest hardware investment.

Of course, improvements to the playback capabilities also require changes to the original filming. As we saw in a previous posting here at GeekDad, Peter Jackson is using Red EPIC digital cameras to film The Hobbit. The move to high-res, high-framerate in turn creates challenges for the crew that the technically-inclined GeekDad audience will appreciate:

A huge challenge across the board is the volume of data that is required for HFRs. Oatley reported that for The Hobbit production shoots 6-12TB of camera data per day. And the shooting schedule (for both parts of the two-part film) involves 265 days of principal photography.

That amount of data means that modern film-making is a serious IT operation requiring massive data centers and an army of dwarves, er, geeks to run them.

Oh – and as if Peter Jackson and The Hobbit don't provide incentive enough for this projector upgrade, some guy named James Cameron is also pushing for the same thing in preparation for a little project of his called Avatar 2.

Just a Little More Trivia:At the moment, video playback in most theaters is 2048×1080 at 24fps, which is pretty close to Blu-Ray's 24fps for 1920x1080 progressive-scan video. Of course, frame rate is distinctly different from refresh rate, so that "120Hz" number the salesman quoted you has nothing to do with what we're talking about here. Don't worry though – The Hobbit will look great on your home theater in 2013. And if you need to obsess about frame rates, refresh rates, and digital cinema, the Wikipedia articles serve as a good starting point.